Everett Considering Micro-Apartments Downtown For College Students

At tonight’s city council meeting, Everett got its first look at a student housing project that would build 99 micro-apartments for students at Trinity Lutheran College. Each apartment would be only 200 square feet, be furnished and have a small bathroom. They wouldn’t have a kitchen but would include a microwave, sink and small refrigerator. The apartments would be built on the southwest corner of Oakes and California across from the Everett Fire Department administration building. In what’s being called a “pilot project” Trinity Lutheran College would partner with a company called Footprint Investments. Footprint would build and own the micro-apartments and Trinity would use them as student housing.

Because of the size of the building lot, there is not enough room for off-street parking at the micro-apartment complex to meet the needs of the residents and also to support businesses such as Austin’s restaurant that use the proposed building site as its parking lot. The proposed solution would have students living in the apartments assigned individual parking spaces in the Trinity Lutheran College parking garage located a block west of the actual apartment building. There would be one assigned parking spot per micro-apartment. In order to move ahead the city council will have to enact an ordinance allowing the “pilot project” and also amend the current zoning laws. Tonight was an initial briefing and a public hearing is set for Wednesday April 23rd prior to a vote by the Everett City Council. Multiple council members expressed concern that the proposed plan didn’t have enough safeguards in case the project failed some number of years in the future. If that were to happen, downtown Everett would be left with an unusable building. Everett Planning Director Allan Giffen told the council they would have those concerns addressed prior to the public hearing and vote on April 23rd.

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